This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what ‘order’ is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what ‘order’ is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.

This book is a study of urban police and their interest in obtaining power as individuals within the organization and collectively within the community. Urban society, beset by increases in crime and violence and the growing irrelevancy of primary socializing agents, must look to the police, the institutionalized control agency, for the preservation of peace, order, and tranquility in the community. The dilemma of a democratic society is how to give the police sufficient power to perform their role effectively, while at the same time maintaining restraints on the police in order to prevent abuses to democratic principles. This book looks at the discretionary conduct of policemen and whether adequate accountability measures exist -- and, if not, whether they can be realized, while allowing for the necessary development of police capabilities in the performance of requisite functions. In its focus on the behavior of police officials and the relationship of the police bureaucracy to the urban political system, the work strives to be both descriptive and prescriptive. The author uses examples from a cross-section of American cities and focuses on Memphis, Tennessee to illustrate the political events and social factors which effect policing. Collective police power is measured by the extent of their discretionary authority and freedom from external controls, individual power is perceived by the rational strategies on the part of police officials striving to attain or consolidate their personal power positions in the organization. Implicit in the police's struggle for power -- both personal and collective -- is the existence of conflict with challenging institutional and environmental forces and actors.

This unprecedented behind the scenes analysis of public order policing, first published in 1994, investigates the impact of increased police powers and equipment on basic democratic freedoms, describing and analysing police operations from protest marches to riots, and from royal ceremonials to street carnivals. When confrontational government policies stimulate inner-city riots and violent protest, the state response is all too often to equip the police with enhanced legal powers and the paraphernalia of riot control. In Britain such developments prompted debates about a drift into authoritarianism. Here the policing of political protest is examined within its political and broader ‘public order’ context, and the text draws on extended and detailed observation of actual events.

The role of the police has, from its beginnings, been ambiguous, even janus-faced. This volume focuses on one of its controversial aspects by showing how the police have been utilized in the past by regimes in Europe, the USA and the British Empire to check political dissent and social unrest. Ideologies such as anti-Communism emerge as significant influences in both democracies and dictatorships. And by shedding new light on policing continuities in twentieth-century Germany and Italy, as well as Interpol, this volume questions the compatibility of democratic government and political policing.